


Forever

by FictionPenned



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alex asked why we even have this lever, Gen, Space Heist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24492352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: "Clara, I'm --" the Doctor starts, but Clara interrupts him before he can finish."Don't 'I'm sorry' me," she says, hiding behind an easy, empty smile. "Don't need it. What I do need, though, is a good, solid adventure. I'm sure you can rustle something up. Entire universe at our fingertips, yeah? Surely there's an empire to loot or a dictator to overthrow or a nefarious plan to derail. I'd even settle for sabotaging an ex, if that's on the table."Clara convinces the 12th Doctor to engage in a prison break. They run into a person who seems vaguely familiar, even though they're sure that they've never seen her before.Written for Day 1 of Thirteen Fanzine's Prompt Week: Space Heist
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 8
Kudos: 84





	Forever

"Anyone tell you that you've gotten all boring lately?" Clara asks, jabbing at a button on the TARDIS console in the vain hope of making something -- _anything_ \-- happen. She could use a good adventure right about now. Something meaningful. Something invigorating. Something perilous. Fear keeps her fast, and at a push, adrenaline is a decent substitute for happiness. Makes the heart all jittery, the skin all flushed, and the stomach all fluttery. It's almost like a first date, or a really, really angry seventh date. One where she can't decide whether to punch someone or snog them. Clara has a lot of first dates and seventh dates, and she pretends that that’s not because she's desperately trying to fill a hole in her heart. 

Despite her best efforts, that hole hasn't seemed to have gotten any smaller. If anything, it’s gotten bigger. Maybe it will keep growing forever, until it finally consumes her, but at least if she’s doing something, then she’s not thinking about it. 

The Doctor glances up, perpetually angry eyebrows perched above a gaze rife with a concern. She sees that worry, even as he tries to mask beneath a string of near-meaningless phrases that toe the line with genuine banter. "You do. Constantly. Become a catchphrase, almost. I hate catchphrases."

"Come on. It's not as if you're not itching to get out and do something. I can sense it, you know. You're not that good a liar." Clara smiles as she sidles a little bit closer, nudges the Doctor with a shoulder, and tugs a lever just for the hell of it. 

A disapproving gong sounds from somewhere deep within the confines of the TARDIS’ engines.

With a weary sigh, the Doctor lays his hand on hers and moves the lever back into its previous position. "First of all, you're projecting. Second of all, if you keep doing that, all the toilets on board this ship are going to stop functioning, and you'll have no one but yourself to blame."

He releases her hand and circles back around the console, busying himself with nothing in particular. He’s always doing that, and Clara doesn’t have the patience for it. 

"What about a heist?" she asks, pushing the point a bit further. "A space heist, even. We could be all Robin Hood about it. Do something in service of the greater good. You're always prattling on about being kind and good and selfless, yet here we are, floating about and doing nothing important."

"Who died and made you the morality police?" the Doctor grumbles, barely loud enough for Clara to hear. 

But Clara does hear it, and the question feels like a direct attack.. 

She flinches. As far as flinches go, it's practically imperceptible, and the Doctor is notoriously bad at noticing those types of things, however, she is enormously grateful that he does not bother to look up. His ignorance offers her a degree of control over her pain and grief, and a degree of control over him. She can make him feel guilty on her own terms, put him at the disadvantage, twist the knife a little bit. It’s not a particularly healthy set of behaviors, but she doesn’t care. 

It takes Clara a couple seconds to steel herself, to lift her chin and dig into the well of determination and hold him accountable. "You really don't want me to answer that question, do you?" 

It takes half an age of silence, but finally, the Doctor raises his head and stares back at her, and she can see the guilt seeping from every pore on his face. He hadn't realized the impact of his words, but she forced him to reckon with them, and he is _suffering_ for it. 

_Good_. 

"Clara, I'm --" the Doctor starts, but Clara interrupts him before he can finish. 

"Don't 'I'm sorry' me," she says, hiding behind an easy, empty smile. "Don't need it. What I _do_ need, though, is a good, solid adventure. I'm sure you can rustle something up. Entire universe at our fingertips, yeah? Surely there's a king to loot or a dictator to overthrow or a nefarious plan to derail. I'd even settle for sabotaging an ex, if that's on the table."

\---------

In the end, they settle on a prison break. 

It was equally amenable to both parties as being _relatively_ safe, technically fulfilling the textbook requirements of a heist, and functionally acting as a protest against this particular facility's policy of imprisonment without fair trial. 

"This feels like it's too easy," Clara comments as they pour over schematics, double- and triple-checking their plan. "It's a space prison in the future, shouldn't this be a bit harder?" 

The Doctor tilts his head, turning his eyes up towards the ceiling. "Between the two of us, we've got at least eight brains, which puts us seven and a half brains up on the Judoon. Very intimidating fellows, but not very engaging chess partners. I would know; I once started up a lunch club with a lieutenant. Granted, it was _very_ short lived chess club, but it still counts.”

"Why was it short-lived?" Clara asks, lifting her eyes from the blueprints and gazing at the Doctor with pointed interest. 

A shrug ripples across the Doctor's shoulders. "I kept forgetting to show up. Never put it in my planner." 

"Oh." Her disappointment is tangible, wrapped around the single, sad syllable. "I was expecting a dramatic story about cheating or something." 

" _Nah_. The Judoon are very, very morally opposed to cheating in all its forms, and I personally don't need to resort to cheap tricks when I can win on my own merit. Only when I can’t.” There’s a pause as he jabs his finger at a bit of paper. “Should we go over this again?" 

Clara's eyes drift back towards the plans spread out before them. "I think I've got it."

"Good." The Doctor grins, but it seems more like a perfunctory gesture than something he actually means. It doesn’t reach his eyes.

“The more important question is have _you_ got it?" Clara says, turning the question back around on the Doctor. 

The Doctor raises his eyebrows. It is abundantly clear that he hasn't gotten used to working with someone who is willing to question his authority, but he'd better start getting used to it. 

Clara’s not planning on leaving anytime soon.

Or ever, if the universe gives her a say.

After a moment of silent challenge, he says, “Got the important bits. Left a bit of room for improvisation. Always need a good moment of improvisation. Gives the whole thing a bit of flare." 

Clara sighs. 

The last thing she needs is to have to rescue the Doctor from some self-wrought peril or another in the middle of the mission.

"One more time then, Doctor" 

\-------

For the most part, the heist goes smoothly. 

The Doctor even manages to keep his ego in check long enough to follow directions. If he was one of her students, Clara would have printed him up a certificate lauding his improvement. Maybe with a gold star stamped in the corner. Kids always love gold stars. 

The only hitch comes in Cell Block 13, when the Doctor unlocks a door, throws it open, and stares blankly at the occupant inside, seemingly stunned. It takes Clara a moment to notice the shift, to realize that the plan has been thrown off its rhythm and circle back around to her floundering partner. 

"Doctor, we can't stop. We have to keep going, come on," she insists, tugging at his elbow until she, too, locks eyes with the stranger inside. 

The stranger is blonde. Humanoid. Clad in a grey coat and rainbows and a pair of yellow braces that have been shrugged off her shoulders and hang loosely by her hips. Her eyes are almost unreadable — green, heart-wrenchingly ancient, horribly familiar, and terribly, terribly sad. 

The sort of sad that never leaves you. 

The sort of sad that Clara feels when she stares at pictures of her dead loved ones but can’t quite manage to summon up the will to cry. 

A chill sinks into Clara's skin and creeps down her spine, and she doesn't quite know why.

The not-knowing makes it worse. 

Involuntarily, her hand releases its grip on the Doctor's sleeve, falling to her side and rubbing up against the light and gauzy fabric of her skirt with a ghostly touch.

The Doctor speaks first. "Do I know you?" 

To Clara, it seems as if a switch has been flipped in the blonde stranger. The woman leaps to her feet with a wild, crazed grin befit only for someone who has been staring at the walls and ceiling of a cell for _far_ too long. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her coat and leans forward, rocking on booted heels. "Not yet. Will do, I expect. Thanks for the favor though. I'll be sure to pass it on in due time, once I manage to get my ship back. Are there teleports in this place? Should be teleports. Entire place reeks of cheap travel options. Are they upstairs or down? Or a bit sideways?" 

The stranger's mouth moves a mile a minute, and it takes the words a minute to sink into Clara’s brain. 

"Right," Clara says, shaking her head to loosen the fog that consumed her thoughts. "Teleports are up three levels, lockers are a hop, skip, and a jump down, if you need to recover your belongings."

"Brilliant. Glad someone knows the place. Only so much detail you can get from licking the walls and hearing footsteps. Tried to get a map out of a guard once, but he disappeared before he could give it to me. Probably unrelated. _Hopefully_ unrelated." 

The stranger takes a couple confident strides forward and shimmies past Clara and into the hallway. Their shoulders brush, and once again, Clara feels that faint whisper of familiarity. It’s an odd sensation. She feels like she definitely would have remembered this woman if they ever crossed paths. Clara’s got a head for pretty faces, and she’s not the sort of person who forgets easily.

The Doctor, still visibly dazed, reaches out a hand towards the stranger as if to see if she’s actually real. 

The blonde jumps backwards, hands leaving the safety as her pockets as she raises open palms in a gesture of cautious warning. "Wouldn't do that if I were you. Prison breaks are one thing. Fracturing the universe is another." 

Slowly, the Doctor lowers his hand. 

Clara glances over at him, unspoken questions scribed in the furrows of her forehead. His own face is unreadable. 

The woman continues blabbering, backing away from them one word and one step at a time. “Anyway, I'd best be off. Good luck to the both of you, though I have the distinct feeling this is going to go well." Her head cants and her nose wrinkles as she reconsiders the statement. "Might avoid Block 5 though. Nasty bit of work up there. Wouldn't go setting that one loose."

Clara's eyes dart back to the stranger. "I think we already did Block 5, didn't we, Doctor?"

The Doctor remains strangely silent, but the stranger doesn't wait for his confirmation. 

"I'll go clean it up then. Don't worry about it. Itching for a good fight, me. Been, what, a decade since I got stuck in there? They snatched me out of my ship. Incredibly rude of them. I'll be leaving a _scathing_ review."  
  
  
  
  
\----  
  
  


There's no proper goodbye. 

The stranger simply turns heel and races off, grey coattails flying behind her. The Doctor and Clara stare after her, caught in a confused, timeless bubble of their own making, suddenly oblivious to the chaos that sounds above and below them as freed prisoners scramble to find a way home. 

After a long moment, Clara turns and stares up at the Doctor. "Why did she say not to touch her? Bit weird, isn't it? She touched me. Brushed shoulders and all that when she moseyed past, didn't we? Wasn't careful about it or anything."

"I think," the Doctor says delicately, tongue working its way around the words. "That she's me." 

Clara scoffs, and she's about to dismiss the whole thing as ridiculous, but then she remembers the suddenness of the change from her first Doctor into this one, how difficult it had been to reconcile the man that he had been before with the man who stands next to her now. The idea that that strange woman might also be the Doctor no longer strikes her as so ridiculous. 

“No. Can’t be. Besides, what do you think you would’ve gotten locked up for? It’s not like you stick around anywhere for long enough to get caught.” As Clara speaks, she forces herself to shake off the strange interaction and to restart on the endless series of locks that line the walls.

The Doctor follows along in her wake, pensive and unhelpful. “Don't know. Probably haven't done it yet."

“Knowing this place, maybe you didn’t do anything.” The words mimic the airiness of a joke, but they never quite soar. 

"Knowing me I probably did something,” the Doctor counters.

Worry sits in his shoulders and on his face, and Clara pokes him in the shin with the toe of her Oxfords. 

"Dwell on it later. We've got fifty more cells to open before the shift rotates."

"Oh. Yes. Quite right." He shuffles off across the hallway, going through the motions of cooperation, but much of his prior enthusiasm has left his body. 

If Clara does make him up a certificate, it won't have a gold star on it. 

Maybe a silver one, if he's lucky. 

She can't really blame him though. The grief in the woman's gaze still sits behind her own eyes. She replays it every time she blinks. She doesn’t want to think that the stranger _might_ be the Doctor. She doesn’t want to think that one day, the Doctor might look at her like that. 

She’ll travel with him forever. 

She has to travel with him forever. 

And she repeats those thoughts over and over again until they become a song, played in time to the rhythm of her feet on the stone floor and the pulsing buzz of the sonic.

Forever.  
  
Forever.

_Forever_.

Eventually, she almost believes them.

\-------

When the pair finally returns to the TARDIS — breathless and exhausted — Clara tries to bring up the strange encounter again. There must be a loophole somewhere, something to prove that the blonde stranger can’t possibly be the Doctor. If she can prove that that theory exists outside the bounds of reason, then she’ll be free of this newfound dread that presses in around her, stealing her breath and tempering her spirit.

Clara can’t afford to be haunted by yet another ghost, so she resolves herself to nitpicking, dismantling, discrediting.

She’s even willing to engage in a bit of obfuscation, if that’s what it takes. 

"But how do you know she's you?" Clara asks, skipping up the stairs two at a time before coming to sit on the balcony, arms draped over the railing and feet dangling over the side.

"I have a feeling." The Doctor says tersely, jabbing at the controls as the TARDIS carries them away from the prison and towards somewhere else. 

Clara _tsks_ her tongue against the back of her teeth in an expression of unearned skepticism. It isn't that she doesn't believe the Doctor, rather, she doesn't want to believe him. She's afraid of the inherent implications of that particular truth. "Is that what we're going on these days? Feeling?"

The Doctor's gaze meets hers -- steady, burning, ancient beyond belief. "You met her. You try to tell me she didn't seem familiar."

"I'm a time-traveller now. Everyone seems familiar," Clara says, glibly dancing around the question.

" _Clara_." The invocation of her name is quietly insistence, and full to the brim with simmering anger. Clara doesn't think that it's entirely directed at her, but she glares back at him all the same. 

Minutes pass.

The Doctor does not budge.

Clara thinks back on that knowing green gaze, the cold shiver that ran down her spine at the sight of it. 

"Yes," she relents after the lengthy period of silence. "She seemed familiar."

Neither of them dare to discuss the matter further. The future is often terrifying, and Clara is very, very afraid that she might not have one. After all, she would never willingly give this life up. The Doctor's stuck with her.   
  
_Forever_.

_Forever_. 

_Forever_.

However, doubt creeps it and saps her resolve, and she stands, disappearing down a corridor and into her bedroom. 

She'll come back out when she's ready, and she already knows that the Doctor won't dare to so much as _knock_ on the door before then. 


End file.
